The Black Garden: Chapter 13

The parasites were like nothing I’d seen before. Despite my need for energy, I almost forgot to eat while I studied the three surviving tadpoles in their now-separate jars. These little champions had eaten all the others, and had grown to about the size of a man’s thumb. They had unpleasant, needle-tipped maws that pulsed and sucked rhythmically as they swam around and around in the murky saline looking for siblings to murder. Their tails were still drill-like, coiling and writhing in ways that could be euphemistically described as ‘non-Euclidian’. I thought back to my weird compulsion to go and see the Fetch Quest’s Navigator. It was entirely possible these little bastards had been responsible.

“Doctor. You ready to do a sweep of the house?” Jak’s voice broke into my train of thought, startling me out of it.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. The Spectator swarm should be finished by now.” I reluctantly pushed the jar away from me, making sure that it was in the center of the counter, and checked the feed from the nanites. “Uhhh… Let’s take a look at the place. Did you find anything new yourself?”

Jak eyed my half-eaten plate of noodles, and shook his head. “Ja, no. If Wigge hadn’t told us he was waiting for the cleanup crew, I would have figured they’d already been through. It’s almost too perfect, too tidy. Place gives me the creeps.”

He was right. The house was gorgeous: open plan luxury, with a big fireplace and a Palae-sized aquarium with decorative water channels and waterfalls running through the building. But something about it was off. A feeling, a hunch that sawed at my nerves like the off-key note of a violin. “Yeah. That awful creeping ‘am I in the backrooms’ feeling. If I didn’t know better, I’d have said there had been an Abyssal breach nearby.”

My abdomen was fully healed now: no scarring, nothing except an oval of pale, tender skin that would harden and darken over the next couple of days. I padded from the kitchen to the living area, looking up and around. The lounge was a square area inset into the floor. When I came to stand in the center, the large sofa was to my left, the fireplace to my right. An open hallway about two meters wide separated the back of the sofa from the door of an office. I could see straight inside from where I was standing. A kidney-shaped desk and chair were still in place. Ahead of me, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto a long open balcony. Square columns broke up the view. They had niches containing fine sculptures, none of which appeared to be damaged.

“Hmm.” My brows furrowed as I flicked my Lifesight on. The air was clean, neither sterile or heavily contaminated. There was no permanganate or any of the other typical Abyssal chemical signatures. Bleach, formaldehyde, phenol, cresol. The house’s maintenance robots used biodegradable, forest-safe cleaners. “Give me a minute.”

“Sure.” Jak leaned against one of the columns, watching on. Tuning him out, I let my eyes flicker closed and drew a deep, centering breath. Then I reached out to Tsariel.

“Lady of all things divided and fated to meet,” I whispered to Tsariel, consciousness to consciousness. “Show me where they were.”

Tsariel had been quiet through the drama, busy doing angel stuff. But as I invoked her, her presence unfolded without protest. My breathing stuttered and my eyes flew open as two pairs of slim, ghostly hands slid over my shoulders.

“Here. See as we see.” Suddenly, the world slowed and became distant, as if rendered in liquid crystal.

I slowly turned my head as the past slithered and whispered around us. The animals that had lived in the forest before the house was built, their bloom and decay; the many humans who had stayed here during their assignments. But as Sh’chani and Boris’s time began, the reel began to warp and decay. Instead of people flickering in and out of scene, there were only aching, empty voids, drifting through the house like ghosts. The surrounding matter subtly warped around the holes like clouds around the eye of a hurricane. Involuntary tears slipped down my cheeks. It hurt Tsariel to show me this. A wound on Reality was a wound directly to her – and to the rest of her kind, all of them.

“They were here... they were here on that final night, moving around the house.” I took a step forward. I felt unreal, diaphanous, like a net spread cast through layers of reality. The larger blob of nothingness pushed from the balcony to the sofa, while another distorted the chair in the office. “And then...”

My eyes widened as humanoid figures uncoiled from holes in the floor, stretching up like pillars of tar dragged through water. Wherever they moved, the air contorted and bled. I watched as they engulfed the spaces representing Boris and Sh’chani. The five invaders – two of them completely obscured within seething fields of Abyssal energy – consumed their victims and left nothing behind.

The pain swelled. Tsariel snapped the connection, suddenly and without warning, and I staggered back with a gasp – surprised when I was caught by a pair of strong, well-muscled arms. My heart pounded, fluttering up against my ribs like a panicked bird. Dizzily, I realized my face was wet.

Jak’s mouth drew across with concern as he looked down at me. “You’re bleeding.”

I reached up to touch my lips. My fingers found a river of blood streaming painlessly from my nostrils.

“It’s fine. I’m okay.” I blinked and grimaced as my eyes stung. “Got a tissue on you?”

Wordlessly, Jak pulled a couple of them from one of his tac-pouches. I held out my fingers to take them, but before I could, Jak pressed it to my nose and pinched my nostrils shut.

“Thab you.” I gave his hand a pat, then took over applying pressure myself.

“You’ve wrecked yourself twice in two hours.” Jak’s mouth sloped to one side. “Don’t know how this is helping us find and kill anything.”

“I just got a glimpse of the… let’s call them ‘people’ who murdered Chani and Boris.” I sniffed and swallowed, patting delicately around my nose and mouth.

Jak watched in confusion as I pocketed the bloody tissue once I was done. “Sit down. I’ll get you water.”

“Well look at Mister Big Dick here, ordering me around.” I looked around, and settled for perching on the coffee table with my back to the fireplace. I needed to be able to see all the doors. “Just as well I like a man who takes charge.”

Jak flashed me a look of disbelief as he found the kitchen, and drew me a cup of water.

“I’m sorry. Things just come out of my mouth sometimes.” I winced, then reached out to Tsariel to make sure she was okay. As angels went, she was young, and the pain of someone being nullified always seemed to hurt her deeply. I sent her soothing thoughts while I watched Jak move around. “I was taking a look at the local reality matrix. Boris and Chani were killed here. They didn’t even get to leave the house. Something happened, right over here.”

I paced over to the office door, and as Jak came up beside me, I took the offered glass and drank. Hydration accomplished, I switched to Lifesight again and scanned the wooden floor in the area where reality had twisted. At the macro level, I couldn’t see anything strange. At the micro level, something was very weird.

“This area here… for about half a meter, the cellular structure is all wrong.” I crouched down and traced around a nearly-invisible boundary. “This floor is made of real old-growth wood. Wood is basically just cellulose, made up of polysaccharides… in trees, they form slightly wobbly lines with ‘pockets’, or larger occlusions at random. The older the tree, the more occlusions there are. But there’s a bunch of circles without the pockets. Same cellulose material, but it’s too linear. The difference isn’t visible to the naked eye, but on the micro-level, it’s like the difference between a sea-sponge and a man-made kitchen sponge.”

Jak’s brows furrowed. “Repairs, maybe? This place has been here for a while.”

“No. These patches are where something bad happened.” I looked up. “Can you sit on that sofa for me? With your back to the door here?”

Without a word, Jak headed around the sofa and plopped down. One of the circles was almost right behind him. I rose and pushed into the office, scanning the floor. There was another too-neat circle of floor behind the chair.

“So… let’s say that Chani was working in here,” I called out. “She’s at her terminal, Boris is keeping an eye on the living room. Then something with knowledge of the house’s floor plan and the typical movements of the occupants rises up from the floor behind her in here, and behind Boris on the sofa. Neither of you have any idea it’s happening until suddenly, the lights go out. Clean, quick, quiet.”

“Through the floor?” Jak twisted around and got up to his knees, looking at me through the doorway. “An assembler swarm?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.” I nodded. “Military-grade assembler swarms disassembled and reassembled the wood to let assassins in. This house is up on posts… let’s go have a look at the ground underneath.”

Jak shuffled his shoulders as he came to join me, clearly intrigued. “How are you getting this stuff?”

“Like I said, I’m one of the best human Biomancers in the Confluence.” I shrugged. “Not a brag, just a fact. I’m one of like… three? Aleph-ranked human Life specialists. It’s a rare ability.”

“You’re good.” The air of grudging respect was back. “Better than Boris. He could throw things around a bit, but that’s all.”

I quirked a smile. “In an ideal universe, no one would have these abilities. ReMa is a symptom of the Abyssal erosion of reality. To be able to do it, you have to get your shit wrecked by demons. They leave scars on your soul… those scars are what gives us the ability to use ‘magic’. Boris probably had some exposure to Abyssal energy as an infant on his home world. Me… that’s a longer story. And private.”

“Oh.” Jak paused for a moment. “I didn’t know. Don’t know anything about magic, or demons.”

“Hopefully you never need to,” I replied. “Come on. Let’s go take a look under the house.”

Mert and his goons were no longer loitering on the porch, and all the cars in the yard were gone except for ours. They had also taken the cordon down, leaving Jak and I alone with the house. The crawlspace was almost high enough to stand under in many places, and the soil was rich, dense with ferns, fungi and microflora - except for several rings of completely dead, dry earth that had been roughly covered with a thin layer of fresh dirt and leaves.

“Here.” I grunted, sweeping the cover away with the blade of my hand. I took a pinch of the dead, gritty soil, and showed it to Jak. It was gray and felt like coarse ash. “Someone without training in soil ecology or demonology wouldn’t know what they were looking at, but this earth has been bleached by Abyss presence. Manifest demons leave a few distinct physical cues, and this stuff is one of them. Nothing will ever grow here again - bacteria, fungi and plants will all avoid it until the heat death of this universe. The floor above us is screwy the same way that the patches in the office and living room passage are.”

“Demons can use assembler swarms?” Jak squinted down at the dead patch.

“No, but humans using assembler swarms can unleash small demons as weapons,” I said. “If I were to make an educated guess… someone is weaponizing another Yevon-class. There’s five of these linear cellulose patches, so that suggests to me an entire hit squad might have raided the house. Two fireteams and a combat controller, maybe. Does the New Warder militia have anything like that?”

“If they do, I haven’t heard of it.” The detective scruffed at his hair in agitation. "Demons... can’t believe I’m hearing this shit.”

“If it makes it easier, think of them as hostile aliens: we call Abyssal entities ‘demons’ as a form of shorthand. These aliens crawl out of their holes with the single-minded goal of exterminating all life, and it’s our job to stop them.” I shrugged, brushing my hands off. “In any case, I need to report to my people – and moving forward, it might be in your best interest to not look too friendly with me. I’m guessing you wrangled your precinct to make sure you were the one to pick me up, but I’d suggest you go back and tell them I’m a queer Confluence floozy with medical super-autism, and I bored you to tears with the latest information on robot-assisted liver resection and accelerated iPSC hepatogenesis.”

“Right. So I tell them the truth.”

I grinned toothily. “Yup.”

“Got it.” The muscles of Jak’s jaws bunched as he locked his teeth for a moment, flexing them to ease some of the tension from his face. “I need some time to think about all this. Next place we should check is Boris’s apartment.”

I looked over at him. “I need to consolidate here and get some rest – I have my orientation shift at one of the city’s hospitals tomorrow. Let’s meet up at Boris’s place after that.”

“Sure.” Jak sighed, and rubbed his fingers up over his scalp restlessly. “My bet? Someone’s already ransacked the place. It isn’t going to be any less fucked by tomorrow.”

“Yeah.” I hesitated a moment, then lay a gentle hand on his arm. “I’m sorry about Boris, really. I’ve… lost a lot of people in this fight over the years. It never gets easier.”

He looked down at my fingers, then back to my face. There was a deep, unspoken pain in his eyes. “Appreciate it.”

I smiled wanly, and let the moment of contact lapse. “From everything I’ve seen so far, there’s something really rotten here in New Warder. The way Boris and Chani were taken out, in a place like this… you need real money for that kind of tech. There’s also some possible links between this and my last mission that are concerning me.”

"Yeah. Your little passengers." Jak paused to think, looking down at the ground as he chose his words. "Tomorrow, at the hospital: don’t let anyone take you into a room by yourself. Be careful what you say about Vornn, and if you ask questions, be careful how you ask them. Nearly everyone here owes the company their livelihood. They might resent it, but there’s pride in them. A loyalty to what they’ve built, and what our parents and grandparents built.”

I regarded him levelly. “And how do you feel about it?”

Jak shrugged. “I grew up here. Keep telling myself I’d probably be better off in the Confluence, but every time I think about leaving, I feel queasy. Lot of people see this as the only free human enclave in a giant alien prison experiment, yeh? Not saying it’s true, but Wardern blood runs thick. I have a feeling that Miss Chani made herself some enemies and Boris got himself wrapped up in it. So be careful, or it’ll be you versus five guys and a demon.”

I grinned over at him, starting to sidle toward the edge of the crawlspace. “I can handle five guys and a demon.”

Jak flashed me an arch look.

“... In a fight,” I finished.

“In a fight,” he echoed.